A Scientist Controlled His Colleague's Brain From Across A College Campus

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists said Tuesday they have achieved
the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending
a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand
motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle
campus of the University of Washington.

The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the
years-long progress that researchers have made
toward brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical
signals generated from one brain are translated by a
computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a
computer cursor - or, in more and more studies, can affect
another brain.

Much of the research has been aimed at helping paralyzed patients
regain some power of movement, but bioethicists have raised
concerns about more controversial uses.

In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke
University Medical Center's Miguel
Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the
thoughts of a rat in a lab in Brazil and sent
via Internet to the brain of a rat in
the United States. The second rat received the
thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior. And electrical
activity in the brainof a monkey at Duke, in North
Carolina, was recently sent via the Internet, controlling a
robot arm in Japan.

That raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers -
or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by
others. Some of Duke's brain-computer research, though not
this study, received funding from thePentagon's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

FINGERING A KEYBOARD

For the new study, funded by the U.S. Army Research
Office and other non-military federal agencies, UW
professor of computer science and engineering Rajesh Rao, who has
studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade,
sat in his lab on August 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked
up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical
activity in the brain.

He looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game but
only mentally. At one point, he imagined moving his right hand to
fire a cannon, making sure not to actually move his hand.

The EEG electrodes picked up the brain signals of the
"fire cannon!" thought and transmitted them to the other side of
the UW campus.

There, Andrea Stocco of UW's
Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences
was wearing a purple swim cap with a device, called a
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, placed directly
over his left motor cortex, which controls the right hand's
movement.

When the move-right-hand signal arrived from Rao, Stocco
involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar
on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. He said
the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily was like that of a
nervous tic.

"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from
my brain get translated into actual action by
another brain," Rao said.

Other experts suggested the feat was not particularly impressive.
It's possible to capture one of the few easy-to-recognize EEG
signals and send "a simple shock ... into the other
investigator's head," said Andrew Schwartz of
the University of Pittsburgh, who was not part of the
research.

Rao agreed that what his colleague jokingly called a "Vulcan mind
meld" reads only simple brain signals, not thoughts,
and cannot be used on anyone unknowingly. But it might one day be
harnessed to allow an airline pilot on the ground help someone
land a plane whose own pilot is incapacitated.

The research has not been published in a scientific journal,
something university spokeswoman Doree
Armstrongadmits is "a bit unusual." But she said the team
knew other researchers are working on this same thing and they
felt "time was of the essence."

Besides, she said, they have a video of the experiment which
"they felt it could stand on its own." The video is at
http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/08/27/researcher-controls-colleagues-motions-in-1st-human-brain-to-brain-interface/

The absence of a scientific publication that other researchers
could scrutinize did not sit well with some of the nation's
leading brain-computer-interface experts. All four of those
reached by Reuters praised UW's Rao, but some were uneasy with
the announcement and one called it "mostly a publicity stunt."
The experiment was not independently verified.

(The story corrects funding source in fifth paragraph and
eliminates reference to Skype in eighth)